Category Archives: Wordpress

Technical Note

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I’ve been having some WordPress/GoDaddy issues on the administration side of this site. If you’ve submitted a comment previously and it has been slow to be approved, I have now remedied the situation. I was not receiving notifications of comments (for some weird reason that I still don’t understand). As far as I can tell, it boiled down to the php_mailer function in WordPress not being supported by GoDaddy hosting, at least in this release.

I found a fantastic plugin that sends notification e-mails using SMTP instead of PHPMail.

Sweet.

Don’t forget about my pledge to not eat red meat. Help me buy a cow from Heifer International.

Going Pink for October

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While most of you read my blog through the tasty RSS feed, there are still a few out there that prefer it in all its beauty in a browser. Those of you who go to the site are in for a treat.

I’ve been wanting to create my own WordPress theme for a long time, but I’ve always been terrified of breaking the three years of blogging backlog I’ve got, so I never tackled it. Then Travis recently took a crack at it and he said it was easy. Now, granted, he is a genius. However, I was intrigued and I’ve been wanting to customize my site ever since. I am, after all, a web designer by trade.

So I mocked up what I liked in Photoshop and coded the XHTML. Then, I used an existing theme to try and figure out the nuances of WordPress and PHP. I managed to figure most of it out and for the last 6 or 8 hours have been working diligently to get it up and running.

There’s no doubt that it’s buggy and I’ve missed plenty of stuff, but for now…it works.

As for the pink – you’ll notice that the design is rather dark…the only color coming from splashes of pink. I’ve decided that to raise awareness for Breast Cancer Awareness month. In addition, the darkness of the site is actually BETTER for the environment because monitors do not have to work as hard to display black. So in “going pink”, I’m also “going green”.

I’m planning on putting in a CSS switcher that will allow you to customize your colors to an extent, but that’s down the road. For now, I must say I’m pretty proud of myself for not breaking it. Sure there will be growing pains, but the fact that I managed to create a widget-ready theme in a night…well, that just makes my header all the more true.

Textpattern Solutions – Take 2

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Textpattern Solutions: PHP-Based Content Management Made Easy
by Kevin Potts, Robert Sable, Nathan Smith, Cody Lindley, and Mary Fredborg

OK, so I’ve totally already blogged about this, but it is definitely worth mentioning again, especially considering that now I’ve actually read the book. (Now, maybe Kevin will send me a copy of his new one…)

I imagine that most of my readers know this, but for those of you that don’t – I am a web designer. My actual title at my real job is Marketing Specialist, but I have a pretty heavy interactive background and have been working for the last few years to really improve my XHTML and CSS ninja-ry.

While this blog uses WordPress, I have previously used Google’s Blogger and done hand-coding for various web projects. Content management was always a concept that was kind of foreign to me. I understood the concept, but I really didn’t have a lot of idea of how it would ever be applicable to the projects I worked on – mostly small sites with less than 10 pages of static content.

As I’ve gotten older and wiser, I am becoming more aware of the need for products like Textpattern, an open-source CMS that is much more flexible and powerful than typical blogging platforms like WordPress and Moveable Type. In fact, I’ve found the perfect project to test my theory.

For several years, I’ve felt that our church’s website has been lacking in functionality. I’ve wanted to re-do it, but I’m not exactly wanting to take all of the responsibility for content creation. So, to me, it seemed like this would be a perfect time to test out Textpattern. As I’ve read through Textpattern Solutions, I’ve found that it is going to do exactly what I want it to do.

The biggest benefit that Textpattern has over other CMS products in my opinion is the ease with which there is customization. Textpattern’s tag system is built on PHP, but you don’t need to know PHP. In fact, it is more similar to XHTML in structure, which makes it really appealing to someone like me who fears PHP somewhat. (It’s all the questions marks…they just seem scary.

Anyway, so I am planning on setting off on the process of building my church a new website this weekend. Textpattern Solutions has been an invaluable resource in my planning and I will lean on it heavily while I work on the site. It will be a long process, but it’s one that I’m not afraid when I have a tool like this – it’s something that I’m looking forward to accomplishing.

And who knows…maybe eventually I will get around to building my own site using Textpattern. We’ll see.

Tweaking

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OK, so I heard something that bummed me out. The current design of this site does not work in IE 7. BLECH.

So, I’m going to be doing some tweaking. Bear with me. I doubt it will be anytime soon before I jump into creating an actual theme like the one in my previous post, but we’ll see.

Feed Readers: Disregard

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NOTE: For those of you who read this site via feed and do not visit, you can ignore this message…it has to do with presentation on the site side.

…

Are they gone yet?

OK, so here’s the deal for those of you that actually visit the site instead of reading the feed: I’m messing with the presentation…it may be a while before I’m done. I’m adding some AdSense ads and stuff in the sidebar (which may or may not stay) and I’m considering working on my very own WordPress theme. It might be a good exercise for me, but PHP scares me. It could be a big old mess.

I know I just redesigned, but after further exploration in a lesser browser (that doesn’t support PNG files…STUPID IE!), I realized it wasn’t displaying right.

I’ve said this many times, but I’ll have some time on my hands in a little while. More on that shortly. Have a great evening.

Site tweaks? Not so much.

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OK, so I was all set to get my blog moved over to a more lightweight theme, considering modding the Indigo theme by Kaushal Sheth. I got it working, but there was something wacky going on with the sidebar widgets and I didn’t really want to mess with all the work of trying to fix it right now. Maybe eventually, but I have yet to find a theme that works better than K2.

I did remove the Flickr photos from the sidebar, although I doubt anyone noticed. Content soon. I also have an update on the weight loss (thought I forgot, didn’t you?).

Feedburner

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I’m testing something with my feed. Bear with me.

OK, so I’m going to try running my feeds through feedburner so I can get better metrics on how many people are signed up for my feed, etc. Anyway…I’m hoping that nothing changes for you in your feed readers…let me know if there are any problems.